paulflexes saidI wish the US would get rid of pennies. It's fucking annoying waiting in a checkout line while some old bitch thumbs through her coin purse to get the exact change, one penny at a time.

Just last week I was in line behind an old man who wrote a check for the $ portion of his purchase and then dug in his pockets for the ¢ portion. I had to piss so it seemed like an excruciatingly long period of time.

Australia ditched the cent aka penny yeeeeeears ago; we're doing just fine. I was pretty horrified with the amount of pennies I got while I was in America, I ended up dumping them in all the Salvation Army tins...

stark93 saidAustralia ditched the cent aka penny yeeeeeears ago; we're doing just fine. I was pretty horrified with the amount of pennies I got while I was in America, I ended up dumping them in all the Salvation Army tins...

newsflash, the salvation army hates gays. Never give them anything or, if you do, make sure they know you're gay.

AMoonHawk saidDefinitely a revenue generator. So for instance here the tax on a dollar comes out to approximately 7 cents, so now it would go up to 10 cents, or 10% of your earnings. And that is just for the purchase of items. Your income is taxed at about 10 to 15% for the average guy. So you are actually paying about 20 to 25% of taxes. If you make about 50K a year, then about $12,000+ a year will go to just taxes.

The worst-case scenario is a single-item cash transaction that costs $0.03 and then gets rounded up to $0.05. But of course most transactions are in amounts far exceeding even the $1.00 example you cite; in these cases, the percentage that the rounding represents declines because its not on individual items but the TOTAL AGGREGATE TRANSACTION. For electronic transactions, there is absolutely no difference: there is no rounding applied.

Your argument is flawed. Aussies (and a few others) can confirm this with their real-world experience... and it's going to work exactly the same here.

I often wondered if more vending machines (or any coin operated machine) actually accepted the penny then maybe it would make them more usable. Hmmm...but that may only be an American problem. Do vending machines in Canada take pennies?

Jockular saidI often wondered if more vending machines (or any coin operated machine) actually accepted the penny then maybe it would make them more usable. Hmmm...but that may only be an American problem. Do vending machines in Canada take pennies?

Sure, it's not much in grand scheme of things, and most everybody hates them. There may be people who feel it's part of American Culture and must stay so, but so was Slavery and that has come and gone with the times. History is In Books for a reason.

Russia still has kopecks, even though they're absolutely worthless and not given much attention. They're seldom counted exactly even in transactions. Last I checked, the conversion was 29.34 rubles to $1.00 USD.

the problem isn' so much the penny as it costs way more to produce the penny than the penny is worth.... and the nickle is something like 11.8 cents. even the us' paper money is pretty out of date (coins are cheaper than bills because you don't replace them as often) and even when bills are needed (a twenty dollar coin would be lost too easily), the material used to manufacture bills isn't the best. in nz, you can't tear there bills, and they can easily go through the wash.